While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

When you are doing a lot of hard fast field work, it's a physical necessity to forget every day. You can't try to remember it in any continuity. You get so burdened if you try to do it the other way. You can't dictate to your material... We found our way in, slid in on the edges. We used our hunches. And it was hard, hard living.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If not, the machine can destroy us.